Home For the Holidays
by neoxphile
Summary: Christmastime in 2009 collides with news that a seventeen-year-old girl has allegedly murdered a couple and kidnapped two small children...and has ominous news about a little boy named William Van De Kamp. - written for the Nursery Files' First Christmas With You challenge
1. November Was White, December Was Grey

Title: Home For the Holidays

Author: Neoxphile

Spoilers: Duane Barry, Ascension, One Breath, Christmas Carol, Emily, The End, The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati, William, X-Files: I Want To Believe

Category: challengefic - written for the Nursery Files' First Christmas With You challenge

Summary: Christmastime in 2009 collides with news that a seventeen-year-old girl has allegedly murdered a couple and kidnapped two small children...and has ominous news about a little boy named William Van De Kamp.

* * *

><p>Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital<br>December 4, 2009

Heavy wet snowflakes drifted by the restroom window as Scully sat on the closed lid of the toilet and waited for the white plastic timer balanced on the edge of the sink to go off. As soon as it did, she looked down at the pregnancy test and sighed.

Negative.

It had been foolish to hope that a pair of missed periods were the harbinger of another miracle baby, but until she saw the results she'd clung to the possibility that it was a successful pregnancy, not menopause, in her immediate future. At least she hadn't told Mulder, she considered. At least she'd keep her idiocy to herself rather than let it infect him too. The doubts must have been at the back of her mind because something had subconsciously prompted her to buy the test on the way to work and take it in one of the single occupancy bathrooms rather than at home.

Most of all it had been a mistake to allow herself to believe that life setting on a smoother course over the past eighteen months was some sort of sign that they might finally get all of the things they wanted out of life. It had truly begun to seem that they had in fact left the darkness behind them after that last case, especially when things began to go better for her at the hospital, and Mulder was contacted out of the blue by Phoebe Katz, formerly of FPS, with a proposal to create a highly fictionalized videogame based on the Monica Bannan case. He had thought it was a long shot, but over the past few months the development was going very well, and he was currently packing for Toronto where her new company was located and intending to go over storyboard ideas for the final production. All that seemed to be missing was their son, and since it was impossible to get him back, the idea that they might have another child to share their life with somehow didn't seem so far-fetched, not if they were finally getting what they deserved.

Now of course that was obviously not happening. For a moment she debated about whether or not she should bring the used test home with her, or if it was okay to throw it away in the wastebasket in the room with her. The odds of one of the nuns getting yelled at was low considering she had a fair amount of company when it came to lay people working in the hospital, but still… in the end she grabbed several paper towels to wrap it in, and then put the whole bundle in the bag the test had come in before shoving it down to the bottom of the trash bag.

Since she'd brushed against more trash than she would have liked to, she spent longer washing her hands than she usually did. And maybe if she was completely honest with herself, part of that was because she wanted to give herself longer before she had to reengage with the rest of the hospital more than out of concern for a risk to her patients' health.

* * *

><p>Eventually Scully opened the restroom door and steeled herself for having to carry on a normal conversation like she wasn't devastated that her body was sending clear signals that any hope for another miracle should be considered now past. She'd already dabbed away the embarrassing tears that had threatened to overflow, so it was now just a matter of pasting a happy smile, or at least a neutral expression, onto her face. <em>I can to this<em>, she told herself as she stepped out into the hallway. _I'm fine._

The thought that she only had to pretend to be okay for a few more days crossed her mind. Just after Thanksgiving she was pulled aside and told that she must take off the last three weeks of December because she had amassed an alarming number of vacation days, and they insisted that she used them up rather than carry all of them over to the new year. In a few more days she would be at home instead of under the steady gaze of her coworkers and occasionally far too perceptive patients. And thank God the weekend was coming up too.

"Hey, are you busy?" a voice asked behind her.

The speaker clearly wasn't one of the nuns, and father Ybarra certainly wouldn't have used the word 'hey' even if he was one of the few men she ran into in the halls so she was intrigued. Maybe it was another doctor, one whose voice she didn't readily recognize. "Why?" she asked even as she turned to see who it was.

If he was a doctor, it was one who was visiting. He was heavyset and older than her, she thought, but it was hard to tell if he was fifty or seventy because a snowy white beard obstructed most of his features. He did have crow's feet, but it was impossible to tell if he had other wrinkles. The fact that he was also carrying a large stack of brown cardboard boxes didn't help. "I could use some help with these if you don't mind," he told her.

"Oh," she mumbled and grabbed three small boxes off the top of the stack. "Where are we taking them?"

"I was told I could store them in a closet down the hall." He frowned. "Too bad I wrote the room number on a piece of paper that's in my pocket."

"I think I know where you mean," she told him, remembering a seldom used broom closet. She led the way there, and jumped back a few inches when opening the door caused a mop to launch itself out after her. He managed to stop it with his shoulder but some of his remaining boxes wobbled precariously.

"That was close," he said, pushing the mop into the room ahead of them. It skittered oddly across the old linoleum tiles and for a moment she was reminded of Fantasia.

She had no idea why the mop had been left by the doorway like that – rather than the room being filled to the brim like she expected, it was practically empty. A few dusty cleaning supplies sat on otherwise bare shelves, and a table with nothing on it was pushed up against the back wall.

"I must say," she said as she watched him put his boxes on the table. He reached for the ones she still held a second later. "This is all very mysterious. What exactly are we doing?"

"You were taking pity on a man carrying too many packages," he said, eyes twinkling with good humor. Then he began to whisper. "And I'm getting ready to play Santa in a few days."

"Really?" Scully lowered her voice to whisper conspiratorially. "Did all of these boxes come from your workshop?"

He squinted a shipping label. "This one is from Kentucky."

"But it is a gift?" she persisted, wondering why she cared. It would make no difference to her life if there were wonderful gifts in the boxes or just refills for the paper towel dispensers in the restrooms.

He nodded slightly. "Oh, sure."

Giving the table a doubtful look she asked, "And will you be wrapping them in here?"

"Nope," he said with a grin. "The parents were told they could have a present handed out during Santa's official visit – if they'd also pay to get them wrapped. Thank God for Amazon and grandmas who like to do their own shopping and wrapping."

"And you're going to be dressed as Santa when you hand them out?" Scully asked, glad that he wouldn't be wielding rolls of wrapping paper in the dusty confines of the closet. The last thing she needed was to do first aid on him if he managed to knock something on himself in the struggle.

He smirked at her. "It's a lot more magical if the sick kids are given a gift by Santa than by Carl, Sister Constance's brother."

She gave him a half smile, glad to finally know his name. The fact that she hadn't until now made the conversation feel a bit surreal. "It's very kind of you to do this to brighten up the Christmas of children who have had a rough year."

"I'm happy to. I've been blessed and I'm happy to give back." There must have been something about her expression that seemed pained when he said this because he said, "I have a feeling you're not feeling quite so blessed right about now."

"Not exactly, no," she admitted. She practically had to bite her tongue to keep from confessing that not being happy made her feel ungrateful for the things in her life she did have. There was no good reason to dump all of that on a complete stranger so she restrained herself.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Carl told her, sounding sincere.

"Disappointments are a part of life," she said philosophically. "I should be well-used to that by now. I'm simply not going to have the Christmas I'd hoped for, that's for sure." The thought of the test buried in the trash made her miserable all over again. Despite what Mulder thought was going to happen come 2012, she thought he would have been happy if she could tell him that she was pregnant. _He really would have been happy about it_, she thought, _too_.

"Well, the holidays have a way of surprising us sometimes," Carl said, sounding nearly as jovial as the man he was planning to imitate soon. "Maybe yours will be better than you think."

"I don't think so, Carl," Scully told him too quickly. It made her wonder if she really believed that she wouldn't be happy without a child in her life. How much of that was because she still felt guilty for giving her treasure away, and keeping Mulder from really knowing him?

To her surprise Carl put a hand on her shoulder. "Have faith. You work in a hospital where miracles of all sizes are pulled off every day. You can't tell me that doesn't gladden your heart at least a little."

"Oh, it does." But it didn't mean that she thought that her life would be improved by the association. "But…" she trailed off, unsure of how to articulate her thoughts.

The big bearded man gave her a sheepish smile. "Maybe I should have followed my sister's vocational path. Listen to me, lecturing you about divinity and I own a hardware store."

"When are you giving out the toys?" Scully asked, hoping to both change and soon end the conversation.

"The night of the eighteenth. I would have preferred later but the powers that be didn't want the children to actually think I was really Santa, and holding off to Christmas Eve like I would've preferred might have muddied the water," Carl explained. "I've met enough young kids to realize that they don't care about the date, they're going to believe what they believe, but try telling that to a board of strict Catholics."

"The eighteenth?" This disappointed her a little. "I won't be here then, but I'm really glad that you're doing this for them."

He stepped out of the closet, and she followed, turning off the light. "I'm sure you do more for them. Don't sell yourself short – my sister really does believe you work miracles around here."

"We try," Scully said.

Carl gave her a little wave and walked back towards the main entrance, step more lively now that he wasn't weighed down with boxes.

She watched him for a moment, then one of the sisters called for her, and she found herself rushing towards a patient's room. At least helping the little boy get his asthma attack served to take her mind off of herself, so that was probably one of the blessings the faux Santa encouraged her to count.

* * *

><p>A long ziiiippppp noise rang in the air as Scully opened the front door that afternoon. So it came to no surprise to her to find Mulder sweating slightly with hands still on his suitcase. She gave his bulging bag a dubious look. "Do you really think that's going to fit into the overhead bin?"<p>

"Sure," he said confidently, then looked down at it. "I mean, I hope it will."

"Oh, Mulder," she sighed with a slight shake of her head. Then she kissed him on the cheek. "Did you try rolling the clothes like Tara suggested?"

"Um, no." She reached down and unzipped the bag, ignoring his "Hey, wait!"

A pair of socks exploded out of the bag, and he caught them before they hit the floor. "Nice catch," she offered, already reaching into his bag and picking up clothes to try the method her sister in law had suggested at Thanksgiving after seeing Mulder's last attempt at packing.

"I don't see what difference this can possibly make," he muttered behind her.

But a few minutes later his bag was packed without bulging at its seams. "There," she said with some satisfaction. Mulder sheepishly handed her the pair of socks that he was still holding. "What would you do without me?"

"I don't know, and I hope I never find out," he said, leaning close to her ear before he kissed her back. His kiss took considerably longer than hers had. Once they finally pulled away, he asked, "What are you going to do without me this week?"

Scully shrugged. Part of her wanted to tell him about the negative test, but did he really deserve having her dump her disappointments on him just before he left for a trip? "I'm sure my patients will keep me busy," she told him when he continued to give her expectant looks.

"It must be a bummer to be in Christmas in December, especially the kids."

"Yes. But it seems that this year the hospital realizes that because they've roped someone into playing Santa for the kids." Even as she said it, she wondered how the families knew that their children would still be in the hospital nearly three weeks from then. Perhaps they just were being cautious, figuring it was better to send a gift the child wouldn't get there than to be overly hopeful that they'd be home for the holiday. "I met him today as he stashed some of the gifts in an old supply closet. I helped him carry a few of them."

Mulder's brow furrowed. "Should I be worried that you were in a closet with another man at work?"

"Mulder!" she exclaimed, laughing with surprise.

He continued to play up his concern. "You don't think I pay attention when you watch that Grey's Anatomy show, but I've caught enough to know that hospitals are a hotbed of clandestine romances."

"Have you ever taken a look at my co-workers?" Scully asked, trying not to giggle.

"I'm sure some of the sisters are quite lovely once you get them out of their wimples."

She raised an eyebrow. "Really. Now you're making **me** worried."

"Scully..." he protested, but he was still smiling.

"I assure you, I was not kissing Santa in the supply closet," she said, but all at once her good humor began to wan when she thought of that 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa' song. No one would be calling her mommy, not this Christmas or any other. A familiar pang of guilt assaulted her when she thought back on the only Christmas she and William had shared - he'd been too young to speak then, and only babbling. Poor Mulder hadn't even been granted that much time with their son.

Apparently her maudlin mood was obvious. "Are you okay?" Mulder asked, tone suddenly laced with concern.

"I'm okay," she reassured them both. Then she patted him on the back. "Come on. If we're going to have dinner before your flight, we've got to go now."

"Right," he agreed, threading an arm around her waist and maneuvering his suitcase with his free hand. "I won't be gone long."

"I know," she told him. Still, the thought of the next several days alone didn't gladden her heart.

* * *

><p><em>an: I will try hard to finish this soon, but feedback will help inspire me to work on this out around other things today and tomorrow, so can I have some? :)_

_Speaking of inspiration: it's not too late to pen your own fic for the challenge (which is to have an XF character spend a first Christmas with a newly born, newly discovered, newly adopted, or newly reunited child. or you can have more than one of the types just listed), especially if you keep it short or post in multiple chapters like I am doing. Google "Nursery Files Challenges" click the challenges link with mulderscreek in the url - not geocities - and the **First Christmas With You** challenge is the first one listed._


	2. A Long December

Several Days Later

The first few days that Mulder had been gone had been more or less bearable because she had work to distract her. But once she went on vacation the house felt even more empty and lonely there without him. For a brief moment she had considered flying up to Toronto to surprise him, but speaking to him on the phone revealed that he was extremely busy, with long days spent with the game team, and too short nights sleeping in his hotel room. She and Phoebe had gotten along cordially during their investigation into her former coworkers' deaths, but they hadn't become friends, so she couldn't simply invite herself to Mulder's meetings. Therefore, she would be spending a lot of time alone in a hotel room, which would probably be even worse than spending time alone at home.

By day four without Mulder their halls were thoroughly decked, and she was running out of neighbors to bake cookies for. Baking for others still held its appeal, but she had just sat down to an unappealing frozen dinner because she didn't have any desire to actually cook a meal for just herself, when her phone began to vibrate on the table.

Scooping it up, she began speaking before he could say anything. "Mulder? I didn't know that you planned to call tonight."

He was supposed to come home the next day, which was something that she was really looking forward to. Although she hadn't managed to find anything tempting enough to serve for one, she had enjoyed stopping at the market on the way home and planning an elaborate welcome home dinner for the next night. Given that the last day was supposed to be very busy for him, she didn't expect to hear from him until he was about to leave for his flight.

"Hi, Scully," Mulder croaked. "I think I've changed my mind. I think you might have something when you say that people should get flu shots." If he intended to say anything else, it was lost when he began to cough.

"You got the flu?" she asked, and immediately had to curb the impulse to ask him if he really had influenza, or if he has the so-called stomach bug that nearly had her ranting every time someone called it the flu. He knew better than that, she thought.

"Yeah. The woman next to me on the plane was sick, and I thought maybe I could ward off with zinc lozenges and vitamin C, but that plan was a failure. Canadian doctors are quite nice, it turns out." Sound was muffled after that for a few seconds but she could still hear him coughing even though he had obviously turned the phone away from his mouth. "And the wait time to see him wasn't nearly as bad as people say."

"I guess that's good. Are you on antivirals?" she asked, thinking back to when he'd first risen from the grave. There had been antivirals then too, but that wasn't something that would make her happy to dwell on.

"I am," he confirmed. "But even with them, I'm not going to be able to fly home tomorrow."

"No, of course not," she replied instantly. It wasn't hard to imagine how completely miserable it would be to fly while ill, or how unhappy other passengers would be to be trapped in a small space with someone coughing as badly as he'd been during their conversation. Although she supposed he already knew that from personal experience. "Don't worry about it. We'll get your flight changed when you feel better."

"I'm sorry," he said contritely.

"What for?" She asked in surprise. "It's not like you set out to get sick, did you?"

"No."

"Then I can't accept your apology. You didn't do anything wrong."

"I still feel bad for leaving you alone for longer when you thought I was coming home tomorrow," he said glumly. "I guess the only saving grace is that I managed to soldier through all of my meetings with Phoebe and the team, and everything's on track."

Scully was glad to hear that he had managed to finish his tasks before succumbing to his illness, because she wasn't looking forward to him staying way longer. either, and at least he wouldn't have to stay even longer once he got well. Of course she couldn't tell him that it bothered her, because how could she without making him feel worse? "I'm glad that you were able to hold out long enough to finish up before getting sick. And I'm fine here, so don't worry about me. I'm getting a lot done around the house, decorating wise. And we both know how much you enjoy decorating for Christmas." The past two Christmases he had reluctantly helped her decorate, complaining all the while.

"I can't say that I'm sorry to miss that," Mulder admitted. "But I promise to get the outside lights hung, if you have any more to go up, as soon as I get home."

"I appreciate that. But you have to concentrate on getting better."

"Yeah. Did you know that you can get chicken soup delivered by room service?"

For some reason this made her smile at least a little bit. "That's good to know." She paused for a moment. "Do you want me to come up there?"

"I don't think I'd feel better if I made you sick too," Mulder predictably said. "And, I think we both know I'm not super fond of your bedside manner."

"That's true," she said with a wince. Since she hadn't told him about her mistake earlier in the month, he had no way of knowing that a reminder of something he had said to her during her pregnancy would sting. "Well, if you change your mind, I'd be glad to come see you."

"I know you would. Love you," he said, sounding tired. No wonder he wanted to end the conversation.

"I love you too. I'll give you a call tomorrow to see how you're doing."

"Thanks."

Somehow it just figured that she and Mulder would spend more days apart, she thought unhappily. Maybe it was karma. She had spent most of December wishing that the holidays could be spent with family, and now she would continue to be alone for the foreseeable future.

* * *

><p>A Few More Days Later<p>

By the time Mulder was back on his feet and scheduled to fly home, Scully was really feeling like something in the universe simply didn't like her. The day of his rescheduled flight was calm and overcast in Virginia, but Toronto was another story. Beginning the night before the weather channel spoke in terms of gloom and doom about a massive snowstorm that was poised to hit the providence where Mulder had already stayed overlong.

So it came as little surprise when he called and the first words out of his mouth were. "Scully? I'm sorry. My flight is cancelled."

"I know," she told him with a resigned sigh. "All the flights out of there have been cancelled."

"You've been watching the news," he commented. From the cacophony of voices she could hear on his end, she suspected that he'd taken a taxi to the airport anyway in the vain hopes that he would hear something different about his flight when he got there. He sighed too. "I can't believe that I'm finally better and I still can't fly home."

"It happens," she said with a shrug he couldn't see. He couldn't see her frown either, which was a blessing.

"I could rent a car-" he began hesitantly.

"No." He wouldn't be doing it for himself, but because he felt guilty for being away from her for so much longer than he intended to be. "You are not a lucky man, Mulder. I would feel a lifetime of guilt if you managed to get into an accident trying to drive home for my sake."

"Are you sure?" he asked, doubt obvious.

"I'm sure," she told him firmly. "Stay where you are until they reschedule your flight."

"Okay." There was a hint of relief to his tone and she wondered if he was conscious of it. "Hopefully it'll be relatively soon."

She thought back to one of the weather people saying that they were expecting the storm to rage on for another couple of days but didn't mention that to him. If she had, he might insist that he could drive again, and she didn't want him out on any more snowy nights, not after he'd run off the road in February the year before. That had been too terrifyingly close to losing him for her comfort. "Stay warm and safe, Mulder."

"I will," he promised, and that's how she knew he would make every effort to. "I love you."

"Love you too."

* * *

><p>December 18, 2009<p>

Two more days had dragged on without Mulder, and in an effort to prevent herself from going completely stir crazy Scully had asked her mother over to have lunch and watch movies. First they had watched her mother's favorite version of a Christmas Carol, and then they had switched to a movie that only had Christmas as part of its plot, The Trouble with Angels.

Hayley Mills and June Hardy had just tried to drown in the pool when her mother turned to her and began to speak. "I wish that you and Fox would reconsider coming to California with me for Christmas," Maggie said, but Scully didn't really think she intended to nag.

Scully shrugged and paused the movie so they wouldn't miss what came next - she had a feeling that her mother was gearing up for a long conversation. "At this point I would just be happy if he gets home from Canada before Christmas." This seemed like a safer subject than to admit that seeing Bill and Charlie's sons would be hard for her. It wasn't just seeing her growing nephews, but the inevitable conversational turn to how Scullys only seemed to produce boys. That was a double-edged sword, because it would inevitably both remind her of Emily and her failure to produce more offspring for her relatives to coo over. "He never would have left for the trip if he realized that he would still be in Canada at this point," she added somewhat defensively, even though her mother hadn't suggested that he was still away by design.

Her mother gave her a long look, making her wonder if her mother could read some of the things she hadn't said on her face. She very much hoped not. "You don't seem to be having much fun around here by yourself," Maggie noted. "But I'm sure he'll be back long before then."

Sighing, Scully turned to look at the calendar behind her. "It's already the eighteenth, Mom. I'm sure there are a few more disasters that life could throw his way just in order to keep us apart."

"Now now," her mother chided gently. "You can't think that way. I worry that you're getting the holiday blues like your dad used to suffer from."

Scully blinked. "Dad got depressed around the holidays?" This didn't seem to jive with the mental image she had of her father.

"Yes, Dana. You never noticed? I think it was because he didn't have anyone to boss around," she said with a smile. "Not like on his ship, of course."

"Well, he did seem to enjoy bossing us around," she said, with only a trace of bitterness. It always taken her and her siblings time to adjust to having their father around and inevitably most of the clashes centered around their father wanting to call the shots rather than their mother. He was more strict, though their mother had been no pushover herself during their childhoods.

"At least he never made you peel enough potatoes to feed fifty men like he did his men who needed to shape up," her mother said with a smirk.

"Well, there was that time when he decided we should volunteer at the food kitchen that Thanksgiving," Scully corrected her. She and Missy had thought it would be terrible, but they'd ended up having a pretty good time. Of course, it had been Missy, not her, to get in trouble for flirting with one of the other teenage volunteers instead of bringing food out to the servers. The fact that they'd already eaten before going to the food kitchen had probably helped them all feel benevolent rather than put upon.

"That's it!" her mother exclaimed, startling her so much that she reared back against her seat.

"What's 'it'?!"

Looking sheepish, her mother leaned over to pat her on the hand. "Maybe you should find a volunteer opportunity rather than moping while you wait for Fox to come home. It's December, surely there are a lot of community efforts that could use an extra pair of hands."

"I'm not moping," Scully protested.

Her mother just gave her a look. Scully shook her head and unpaused the movie. On the screen Hailey Mills and the beleaguered nuns continued their wacky adventures, but she did give her mother's idea some thought.

* * *

><p>Later<p>

There were more cars in the lot than typical of an evening at Our Lady of Sorrows, which had her wondering if some of the children's parents had come to see their children interact with Santa. She couldn't blame them if they had – she would have given a lot to have been able to see the wonder in Emily or William's eyes as they sat on the lap of the big guy and recited their Christmas wishes to him. Unfortunately, Emily hadn't been hers to take to the mall before she got ill, and William had been too little to get anything out of the experience before she gave him up.

These thoughts had her feeling bad again, so she gave herself a swift mental shake. _What's wrong with you lately? Do you need to go back into therapy? _she asked herself, and there was no ready answer. Of course the more clinical part of her piped up that if she had entered perimenopause which would be pretty normal considering she was now in her mid-forties like it or not, of course her hormones were completely out of whack, so it explained her becoming overly emotional. _It's too bad Dr. Kossoff has retired_, she mused as she walked into the hospital.

"Doctor Scully?" a pleasant voice asked behind her. She turned to see one of the sisters standing behind her smiling uncertainly. "Did you leave something behind when you left for your vacation?"

"Oh," Scully started to say, but she stopped in the middle. She hadn't really been invited to help out, so maybe it was better just to go and see if there was something she could do to be useful rather than to ask to be directed to where Carl was giving out gifts. "Something like that," she finished lamely with an awkward smile of her own.

"Well," the sister replied. The nun looked more relaxed now, as if it had really bothered her to see Scully when she hadn't expected to. If not for the fact that it would never happen at the hospital, Scully would wonder if she'd stumbled across secret Santa activities, or if there was a staff Christmas party she hadn't been invited to going on. "I hope you find what you need and enjoy the rest of your holiday. Merry Christmas, doctor Scully."

"Thanks. And merry Christmas to you as well, sister."

The other woman gave her a gentle smile and Scully found herself wishing she had something to give her. What did you give a nun, though? Would a scented candle or a nice lotion be appreciated? _You know what?_ Scully thought to herself. _Screw the rules._ _Next year I'm secret Santa'ing the nuns and everyone else._

The thought of Father Ybarra bemusedly holding a tiny gift bag festooned with tissue paper as he pulled out something from Yankee Candle with his free hand made her grin as she made her way up towards the storage closet where she and Carl had left the presents.

But a couple of minutes later it melted away into a frown. Except for a curl of ribbon on the dusty table, there was no sign that there had ever been any presents in the room. It was only six-thirty, and she assumed that she'd be early enough to give Carl a hand when he had to cart the gifts off to wherever he was going to give them out.

She decided that maybe she could still see the kids' reactions, but there was no one to be found in the kids' playroom or any of the other rooms that would be big enough to hold such an event. Disappointed, she left the hospital wishing that she hadn't taken so long to make up her mind after her mother left. For half a second she'd almost visited one of the kids on her way out to see if they'd enjoyed it, but that had struck her as a faintly ridiculous impulse, so she hadn't followed through with it. With her luck she would have asked a kid whose parents hadn't been able to participate and upset the little girl or boy just for the sake of satisfying her curiosity.

"Next year I'll ask him when he plans to give out the gifts," she mumbled out loud as she walked back out to her car.

It was snowing lightly again and her windshield wipers squeaked unpleasantly as she drove home. At least they weren't expecting as big a storm as the one that had grounded Mulder.

* * *

><p>A frozen turkey pot pie and a Christmas romantic comedy on Netflix didn't make for much of a Friday night, but at least it looked like Mulder might be able to come home sometime that weekend. She was expecting a phone call from him when the landline began to ring.<p>

Scully snatched up the phone without looking at caller ID to see who the call was from; very few people use their home number rather than their cell phones, so there seemed no need to. "Hello?"

And then she immediately learned that it wasn't Mulder. The voice on the other end of the phone was impatient. "I need to speak to Fox Mulder."

Her caller's gruffness didn't do much for her, so she wasn't inclined to be sweet or polite. "He's not home right now." Though she could have explained that he was away on business or offered him Mulder's cell phone number she didn't feel like being helpful.

"Look, is this his wife?" the man asked abruptly.

This startled her enough into blurting out "yes" without wondering what made him suspect that.

"Okay, good. I'm detective Darrel Lybecker from the Alexandria police department-" She blinked, wondering why a cop from D.C. would be calling, and then if there was another city called that in the US. She supposed not given he seemed to assume she'd know exactly where he meant."-and I'm calling about your stepdaughter. She's in some pretty damn serious trouble, so if you can make sure your husband gets back to me as soon as he can-"

"What stepdaughter?" Scully asked, not realizing that she'd said it out loud until the cop sounded awkward when he spoke again.

"Uh… Kyrie."

For half a second she thought he was about to evoke a prayer, but then realized it was actually the girl's name. "Kyrie what?" she demanded to know, wondering if this was some sort of prank call. If he said Eleison she would hang up on him.

There was a faint sound of paper rustling. "Kyrie Fowley. She's seventeen?" he said, but his tone was definitely uncertain enough that it sounded like a question. It was obvious that he thought that she knew about her husband's child. Maybe the poor man was wondering if he had accidentally called the wrong woman, and was creating a riff in an innocent couple's life. She wished.

"Dammit," she swore, not quite under her breath. "I knew her mother. I didn't know about Kyrie, though." _Did Mulder?_ she wondered. Somehow she didn't think so. There weren't too many secrets between her and Mulder, and certainly none left the size of having a child with his ex-girlfriend would be.

"Huh. Well, the girl claims that her mother's dead-"

"She is. Died back in 1999." And she'd left Mulder at the end of 1991. If this girl was who she claimed to be, it seemed likely that she'd been born a few months after Diana had left him to go to Europe. It felt a bit surreal to realize that a few months after she herself had met Mulder, he'd become a father, whether he knew it at the time or not. She wished that she knew when exactly Fowley had left so she could figure out which case they'd been on when that happened.

"Okay, so that much is true, then." Detective Lybecker broke into her thoughts, and sounded uncomfortable.

"But you don't believe other parts of her story?" Scully asked, wondering if being a pathological liar was hereditary or influenced by nurturing instead.

"No, no one would," he snapped.

The cryptic nature of the comment was beginning to frustrate her, and she wondered if she was going to get anything useful out of him. She wasn't the girl's blood relation so maybe he was being evasive because of that. There was only one way to find out. This wasn't her immediate concern, though. "You've been questioning her without her father present?" she demanded to know. It occurred to her that the girl probably had another guardian, but if she did, why were they asking to speak to Mulder?

"No," he said a bit too quickly. "But she said some…things before her rights were read to her. Things that can't possibly be true."

A headache began to build at her temples and she tried to rub them with the hand not holding the phone. "What has she done, anyway?"

"We're holding her on two counts of kidnapping. And on of suspicion of two murders," he added, as a confusing after-thought.

"A seventeen-year-old is being charged with all that?" Scully asked, trying to be incredulous without any real degree of success. The fact that she was apparently Dianna Fowley's child was making it difficult for her to really convince herself that the girl was incapable of doing as much damage as the detective was implying she had.

"I'm afraid so," he said, sounding like he still wished he was having a conversation about anything else.

"Who did she allegedly kill? And who did she kidnap?" Scully asked impatiently, hoping that he would answer before he thought better of whether or not he should. It was far easier to prove that the girl had kidnapped someone than murdered someone – simply having the kid with her without a parent's permission was reason enough not to add 'allegedly' to that charge too.

"We think killed a couple who were the adoptive parents of one of the kids she kidnapped-"

"How old were the kids she kidnapped?" Scully blurted out. There weren't too many teenagers she could imagine that would want to deal with kids so badly that they kidnapped them. Most had to have their arms pulled just to get them to babysit. Maybe somebody had put her up to it. Knowing her mother, it wasn't hard to imagine that the apple hadn't fallen far from that metaphorical tree and that the girl could already be wrapped up in trouble like that.

"The older boy is two and a half," Lybecker surprised her by saying. "The younger one is about three weeks old."

"Three weeks?" Her voice rose in an embarrassing squeak.

"Yup," the detective said, apparently not surprised that this shocked her. "And honestly, a girl that age with a baby, we suspect that it's really hers. She insists that he's not her son, but we haven't done a psychical exam."

"And you won't without her father's permission," she said sharply. "She's a minor. You shouldn't even question her without a parent present."

"I know," the detective said with just as sharp an edge to his tone as hers. "That's why we're trying to get a hold of him."

"He is away on business," Scully told him. "Up in Canada, and the airport is closed so I don't know when he'll be back. I'm hoping that he'll be home this weekend."

"Do you have a number where I can reach him at his hotel?"

She paused for a moment. "I think it would be better if the news came from me."

"All right," Lybecker said reluctantly. It was very clear that he didn't trust that she would actually tell Mulder what was going on. In a way she supposed she couldn't blame him, there had to be women that would just pretend the phone call never happened. There was no way for the detective to know that she wasn't one of those women who just pulled their heads into their shells when faced with unpleasant truths. "The sooner you can speak to him about this, the better off his daughter will be."

Maybe Lybecker was giving her more credit than she initially thought after all. He was trusting that she wouldn't simply sit on it to make things worse for the girl that she had never met.

"I'll call him now," she promised, not that she wanted to. "What's your number so he can get back to you?" she asked. The police department's phone number would be easy enough to find on the Internet, but she figured that Lybecker had a direct number, and that he would be eager to give it out rather than waiting for someone to route Mulder's call to him.

"Thanks, hopefully I'll hear from him soon," Lybecker said, sounding rather sour as he ended the call despite the perfunctory expression of gratitude. Scully supposed she couldn't really blame him, it was never easy to work with teenage suspects, and the fact that Mulder was not readily available must make things even worse.

But she didn't spare him very much pity. After all, she was the one who was going to have to call Mulder and break the news to him. In her opinion that was much worse.


	3. Who's That Girl?

Despite the promise she made to the detective, Scully found herself sitting at her kitchen table for almost fifteen minutes before she could nerve herself up to make the phone call. During most of those minutes she wondered what the girl was like. It was easy to paint a mental picture of what a child raised by Diana Fowley would be like - as cold, arrogant, and insufferable as her mother - but it was harder to imagine a child who had only had Diana in her life for the first few years and then had been raised with other influences. Whatever those might have been. Had Kyrie been adopted by a loving family after her mother's demise? It was a nice thought, but she very much doubted it. Because if Kyrie did have a loving family why weren't they at the station with the girl right now?

It was the thought that Kyrie probably didn't have anybody if they were looking for Mulder that finally made Scully pick up the phone and call him. This scared her, though. What was the best case scenario? That the girl would get off on the charges, and come to live with her and Mulder until she started college? She would of course be intelligent enough that college was a reasonable expectation; of all of the things that Scully found objectionable about Diana, a lack of intelligence was never one of them. In fact, she had actually been too damn clever for her own good much of the time.

Dialing Mulder's phone number would set them off on a completely different path. And yet, she had to do it because it was no way around it. It was hard to blame her for doing it with trembling fingers.

"Hey, Scully, what's up?" Mulder asked cheerfully as soon as the call connected. "I thought I was supposed to call you tonight." Apparently he was completely unaware of what the nature of their conversation would be.

_How could he know_, she asked herself, _unless having a daughter isn't a complete surprise.._. But Diana seemed more likely to successfully keep a secret from everyone than he did from her, so she had to think that he was about to be blindsided. This realization made her cringe, but there was no good way to ease into the topic. "Do you know about Kyrie?" she asked point-blank.

"It's the first word in a two word phrase that approximately translates to 'Lord, have mercy' and is the common name of an important prayer of Christian liturgy," Mulder said promptly.

All doubt she had about his knowledge of the girl was erased with that flippant answer. He had a better poker face than she did, but he wouldn't have reacted like she was asking him for a bit of trivia if he knew his daughter's name.

"Not Latin, Mulder. Kyrie Fowley, age seventeen. She claims to be your daughter," Scully told him without any preamble. She paused only long enough to let him do the mental arithmetic. "Did you know that Diana was pregnant when she left you?"

After a bit of hesitation he finally said, "No. I had no idea." His tone was hard to read, but it wasn't joy that filled his voice. It was more akin to sadness or betrayal, and maybe frustration.

"I didn't think so," she replied, and something tense inside her eased up a bit even though she felt empathy for him. It hadn't seemed likely that he would have hidden the existence of a child from her, but she hadn't really been rational in many of her dealings with Fowley. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe he could have decided against telling her so she wouldn't go off the deep end and finally decide that she had a legitimate reason to kill his ex.

"Did she come to you? Kyrie, I mean," he asked quietly. "If she came to you because she needs something like money for college tuition or place to stay, we'll work it out. I'm not sure how yet but-"

Her heart sank a little more when she heard this. If he thought that the worst case scenario was that his nearly grown daughter had shown up out of the blue seeking support during her final year of high school, he should have thought of things a bit bleaker.

"No," she said, interrupting him before he could say anything else to break her heart with his naïveté. "The police contacted me about her. Actually, they were looking for you, but I got them to tell me what they'd brought her in for."

"What?" he sputtered in confusion. "What do they think she did?"

"Alleged murder and kidnapping," she said miserably. She tried to imagine what it would have been like if she'd learned about Emily only after she'd become a murder suspect. The only upside she could imagine to that was that Emily would have lived long enough to be accused of crimes that serious.

"Where?"

"Alexandria. They want you there." She didn't explain that they 'they' was the police because he had to know that. "They need to have a parent there to question her."

"I'm not going to be able to get there tonight," he told her, as if that needed to be said. "All the news can talk about is flights still being cancelled. They don't even know if they will be able to fly tomorrow yet." There was a very long pause, and then he asked, "If the Alexandria PD agrees to it, could you go there for me?" His unspoken plea was that he didn't want his daughter there alone, which was another thing she didn't need to be told.

The request took her longer to think over than she wanted to admit. "I guess I have to. Hold on a second, the detective who contacted me gave me his direct line for you."

She recited the phone number to him, and wasn't surprised to hear him typing it rather than writing it down. His handwriting was perfectly legible, but he often typed out things that could be handwritten instead. Perhaps, she reflected idly, it was because hard drives were harder to burn than paper files.

As soon as the clicking stopped he said, "Thank you. If they agree, I'll have them call you."

"Right."

"And if they don't," Mulder said uncomfortably. "… I guess she'll just have to hang tough until I can fly home."

"Hopefully they will let me see her," Scully told him, much more for his benefit then because she actually wanted to drive to Alexandria at that time of night.

They hung up then, and unlike usual neither of them said 'I love you.'

* * *

><p>Mulder must have called them as soon as he hung up with her, because she heard back from the police department less than forty-five minutes later. They weren't entirely enthusiastic about having her there, and noted that it was an unusual circumstance that allowed it at all, but at least they weren't going to insist that the girl simply be held until Mulder could get back. It made her wonder if they felt bad for Mulder's daughter on some level.<p>

She knew that she certainly did, and this was something that her thoughts kept circling back to on the drive into Alexandria. No matter what the girl had done, she couldn't allow herself to blame her for being Diana's child. If she had been twenty-seven instead of seventeen an argument could be made that she should have contacted her father and let him know of her existence, but she was only a minor. She had no legal right to contact him, even if she wanted to. Even if she knew who he was. More than his name, she reflected. The girl had obviously learned that at some point.

It was obvious that they were waiting for her, because the first thing she heard when she stepped into the station was, "Mrs. Mulder?"

Scully glanced at the person behind the desk before smiling wanly. "Doctor Scully. I kept my own name when I married."

"Of course," the officer said, seemingly slightly flustered. It made her wonder if assertive women were infrequent visitors to the station. "Detective Lybecker asked me to bring you to him as soon as he arrived."

"Lead the way," Scully invited.

Lybecker turned out to be a mid-aged man with a severe buzz cut that only half hid the fact that his otherwise dark hair was graying. Since she was feeling her own age so keenly lately, this made her thankful that her hair hadn't begun to gray, and might not if checkout aisle magazine articles were to be believed. It was clear that the detective had been sizing her up too, because not three seconds after she reached his office he said, "I think I told you that we don't usually allow this sort of thing, but considering the fact that your husband is marooned hundreds of miles away, we made an exception in this case."

"Great," she muttered, not feeling it all flattered that she had been granted this exception. It really would have been much better if Mulder could deal with this, but since he couldn't, she had to. That didn't mean that she had to like it.

Rather than lead her to the girl directly, Lybecker irritated her by asking her to take a seat in his office. She wanted to demand that she be allowed to see Kyrie immediately, but honestly, she could wait.

"Coffee?" Lybecker asked, glancing at the clock. "I'm afraid you're probably in for a long night, and maybe caffeine will help."

_A longer night_, she thought. Traffic hadn't been with her and it was already quite late. "Thank you," she said with all the politeness she could muster up.

Lybecker stuck his head out into the hallway, and said something indistinctly about coffee, before returning. _It must be nice to have people at your beck and call_, she thought. Neither she nor Mulder had ever had anybody at the FBI willing to go and bring them anything, not even old files.

"Thank you for contacting your husband so promptly," Lybecker said as he returned to his seat.

"Right." The hour was late and her patience had worn thin, so she immediately demanded to know, "So what exactly are you planning to charge her with?" She was vaguely aware that the knuckles of her hands had gone white as she gripped the arms of the chair she was sitting in herself.

"At this point the charges are just pending," Lybecker began to equivocate.

Scully cut him off with a shake of her head. "Don't give me that run around, I spent the better part of my adult life in the FBI, and you know that I'm not talking about paperwork here."

To his credit, Lybecker didn't will wilt under her glare. "Officers are still looking for enough evidence at the scene to charge her with the murders of the two people we discovered in the house just after we found her and the two children there. Obviously, we have enough evidence that she had the children."

"Legally she still a child herself, you know," Scully snapped. Then she thought a moment. "Were both of the children placed with the same family?"

Lybecker shook his head, and he looked as confused as she felt. "No. They were only the adoptive parents of the older of the two, Nathaniel. The girl claims that she was supposed to bring the baby to them, which is another reason we suspect that he is her child. But…"

She gave him a sharp look when he hesitated. "But what?"

"I know they say that young mothers bounce back more quickly than older women do when they have a baby, but she sure doesn't look like she could have given birth three weeks ago."

"So you're just assuming that she kidnapped the baby?" Scully asked pragmatically.

"I don't know what else to think," Lybecker shot back. "If he's not her baby, he has to be somebody's. If he somebody else's, she must have kidnapped him too."

Scully canted her head as she looked at him. "If you ran across me eating lunch with my twelve-year-old nephew, without my brother or sister-in-law present, would you assume that I had kidnapped him?"

"Of course not."

"Because there are other explanations for why someone else's minor child might be in my company?" she asked. "Such as babysitting, for example."

"This girl would be a pretty poor choice for a babysitter," Lybecker said stubbornly.

"That might be true, but that should have no bearing on whether you charge her with one count of kidnapping or two." Scully frowned slightly when he met her assertion with a barely disguised grimace. "What can you tell me about her?" she asked.

He shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

"A good place to start would be her living arrangements. My husband didn't know she existed and you haven't introduced me to adoptive or foster parents…"

"I don't know," Lybecker said, and he sighed when she shot him a disbelieving look. "The only parent she would say anything about is your husband. She has a valid ID on her, but when we looked up the address, there's nothing there, so that's obviously not where she's living."

"And you didn't think to ask her?"

"We thought to ask her," he grumbled. "She wasn't inclined to answer any questions about where she lives, and her father's name and phone number were all she gave up when we demanded to know who was responsible for her."

Scully could picture how he 'demanded' the information, and she wasn't sure she would have told him more than the bare minimum either. "Do you think she's homeless?" she asked, not really wanting to think about that. It upset her some that the girl really didn't seem to have any adults in her life to turn to.

Not that she didn't want Mulder to have a relationship with her, Scully insisted to herself, but because being on your own at that age was mildly tragic to her, and totally outside her own scope of experience at the same age; Maggie had been there to help her study for her SATs and helped proof-read her college essays. The only time she'd seen her father shed a tear outside of a funeral service or when Charlie had gotten pneumonia at age three was when she and each of her siblings left for their freshmen years of college.

To her slight relief, the detective shook his head. "She's too clean, and too well-dressed. Her clothes might not look like much but I know from having teenage girls myself that they come from the sort of mall stores that put ink packs on everything so you only end up with ruined clothes if you try to shoplift them. She's living somewhere, even if she's closed-mouthed about it."

"Okay." She thought a moment. "Is she in school?"

"Not that I can tell," Lybecker admitted. "She won't say and none of the schools we called around to know anything about her."

Scully nodded slightly. She'd gone to school with a handful of kids that had graduated at seventeen, so maybe that wasn't so unusual. Mulder had never said when Diana had left him, nor had Frohike ever volunteered the information, so she didn't know if the girl was barely seventeen, on the verge of eighteen, or somewhere in between.

"I don't know what to tell you, Mrs. Mulder." He seemed to smirk when she bristled at this. "She hasn't volunteered much, so I'm glad you're here so we can get more out of her."

"I want to see her," Scully announced abruptly.

For second she thought that Lybecker was going to protest, but he seemed to realize that he didn't have any grounds to, so he slowly nodded instead. "Okay, that is why you're here, I guess."

All sorts of icy retorts about how being there wasn't her idea crowded her mouth, but she was careful not to let any escape. The last thing that Mulder's daughter needed was for her to start off by purposely antagonizing anyone on the police force. Even if she didn't feel like she owed the girl more, Mulder wouldn't thank her for it if Kyrie ended up getting extra grief because of something she'd said or did.

Lybecker surprised her when he immediately left the room, leaving her to follow him. Though she had expected him to take his sweet time about leading her to their destination, he actually moved pretty sprightly and with purpose. Maybe he wasn't the only one who was feeling the lateness of the hour. After a short walk, they came to a stop.

"She's in there," Lybecker indicated with a wave towards a window. Scully stepped up to it without hesitation as soon as she recognized it as an interrogation room. She knew very well that there was a mirror on the inside of the room, so the girl wouldn't know that she was being scrutinized.

Kyrie had pulled her knees up and was resting her heels on the seat of the chair. Her arms were wrapped around her jean-clad legs, and Scully felt a brief pang of pity for her. Regardless of whether the accusations against her were true, the only way she could possibly look more miserable would be to actually being crying. The expression on her face said that she was fighting that urge with every fiber of her being, and so far it was a battle that she was winning. As soon as she became conscious of this observation Scully couldn't help but think of the girl's mother, though she tried to push the thought away. It would do neither her nor Kyrie any favors if she kept trying to compare her to the late Diana.

As if in defiance of this conviction a vaguely curious voice asked over her shoulder, "Does she look like your husband or more like her mother?" She didn't bother to turn to look towards him. Instead she continued to look at the girl.

Kyrie was smaller than Scully had imagined that she would be. Mulder was tall, and Diana hadn't been short either. But Kyrie was probably no taller than Scully herself was. Even in the abstract it was hard to imagine a teenage girl managing to overpower and kill two people, and now that she was looking at her, the idea seemed positively ludicrous. If Kyrie was one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, she'd eat her hat. No wonder Lybecker had so much trouble believing that she could have given birth to the younger of the two children.

"She looks like her father some," Scully offered after a while. "She has his eyes." But not his nose, she privately noted with some relief. She'd always been fond of that feature of his, but what added character in a man would just be unfortunate on such a delicately built girl. "Both of her parents have dark hair, so it's hard to tell about which gave it to her." The girl's dark hair was down to her shoulders, and even jammed under a plum colored knit beret it was clear that it curled.

"I'm glad she doesn't look just like her mother," Lybecker surprised her by saying. When she raised her eyebrows at this, he didn't look cowed. "I'm just saying, if I found out my wife had a kid by someone I'd known, and obviously hadn't liked much, I'd be happier if I didn't have to see my enemy every time I looked at her boy."

"Diana and I weren't-" Scully paused, and abandoned the obligatory protestation. "We weren't friends. And you're right, it's probably easier on me that she doesn't look like her mother's clone."

"She worked with you?" Lybecker asked, and this made her wonder how much Kyrie had actually been told about her father. And more importantly, by whom. When Diana died, Kyrie had only been in elementary school. Had someone else told her about her father and his work? And if they had... the implications of that were almost worse than the crimes the girl was accused of.

"For a short time. She'd worked with my husband, and had been in a relationship with him, before he and I met. Some project took her to Europe, so she left him behind. And then she returned to the US not terribly long before her death," Scully admitted, and she was happy that this didn't seem like old news to him. Until she wondered if Kyrie herself knew all about it but hadn't shared with the detective.

"I bet you're pissed at her all over again right about now," Lybecker said.

Her curiosity got the best of her. "Why?"

The detective shrugged. "You husband said he didn't know about the kid either, and I believed him. Going away and never telling anyone you had a kid is one thing, but to come back and still keep that from people? That's awfully cold."

"That was Diana for you."

"And yet you don't seem real surprised that she was capable of that level of deception," he noted. "She must have been a real piece of work."

Scully almost opened her mouth to agree, but then all at once she realized that she was falling into a trap. More likely than not Lybecker only playing at being sympathetic. Instead he was trying to establish the fact that Fowley had been a person capable of unthinkable acts... and by extension her daughter probably was too. This realization had her kicking herself, but she tried to remind herself that it was late and she'd gotten a hell of a shock, so it was not too surprising that she'd let her guard down. "Makes me glad that she wasn't the one who raised the girl for long," she said flatly.

Lybecker looked vaguely disappointed, confirming her suspicions about his motives. "Right."

Staring in at the girl it wasn't hard to imagine what she'd looked like a decade earlier, and she felt a renewal of her old hatred of Diana. It was bad enough that she'd left Mulder without telling him that she was pregnant, but she hadn't bothered to tell him when she'd come back, either. It might have been upsetting if Mulder had taken custody of his young daughter only a couple of years after Emily died, but at least she wouldn't have grown up however she had after her mother's murder.

"Can I speak to her now?" Scully asked, but it was less a question than a demand.

"Of course."

Scully gave him a frosty look. "Alone at first. Don't bother with a camera either, I know where to look for it."

"You can have ten minutes alone with her, but then we're going to start questioning her about these crimes," Lybecker informed her.

"Okay." Ten minutes seemed quite long to talk to a kid she'd never met before, but she wasn't going to argue with him about it.

"Go on," he said, waving her towards the door.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.


	4. Secret Things

As soon as the door opened, Kyrie looked up sharply. She now looked more annoyed than pitiful. "Who are you?" Kyrie asked, tone as sullen as Scully could have predicted from the expression on her face. Kyrie had no idea who she was, and no reason to think that she was in another adult just about to make her life even more miserable. "I know you're not my lawyer, not dressed like that."

Scully looked down at herself, almost surprised to see that she was wearing an olive green fisherman's sweater and jeans, neither of which would have passed muster if she'd gone to the hospital that day as a doctor instead of a visitor. No wonder the nun she'd met in the hallway had looked at her so strangely - it had undoubtedly been the first time she'd ever seen her dressed down.

"I'm Dana," she offered, and the girl gave her a blank look. "Your father is my husband."

The teenager blinked now. "I didn't know he was married," Kyrie said.

"Surprise," Scully said dryly. The girl had no way of knowing how often other people had shown similar surprise in the year and a few months since she and Mulder had exchanged vows before a very small group of loved ones. "Your father will be here as soon as he can, but at the moment he's snowed in near the airport in Toronto."

"Traveling on business?" Kyrie asked.

"Something like that," Scully agreed. "Since he can't be here, the detectives agreed to let me speak to you."

"Why would you _want_ to?" Kyrie demanded to know. "The fact that I exist can't make you happy. I mean, your husband having a kid neither of you knew about? That's got to be upsetting."

Had the girl already known that her existence was a surprise to them, or had it been something Lybecker had told her to needle her after talking to Mulder? It was hard to hazard a guess. "The fact that you're in trouble doesn't make me happy, but existing… I haven't made up my mind about how to feel about that," Scully told her, deciding that honesty would be something the girl was more receptive of than a cheerfully false insistence that she already loved her. At seventeen she wouldn't have appreciated someone trying to be best buddies with her off the bat, and she was hoping that this girl wasn't so different because she didn't know how warm and fuzzy she could be on demand.

"Did you work with my dad?" Kyrie asked curiously. Scully was slightly startled by this, but she tried not to let that show. "You did, right? No one ever told me your first name."

"I did," Scully acknowledged. "For many years."

"Then you're Scully," Kyrie said triumphantly, and for a second she almost sounded like Mulder when he'd figured something important out that had alluded others.

"That's me. Dana Scully."

"Okay, well, then I know who you are." The girl looked less confused, but Scully wasn't.

"But how?" Scully asked. "Who told you about me?"

To her disappointment, Kyrie just shrugged, as if she didn't know, or maybe didn't consider it important.

Scully glanced around the room trying to see if she could actually spot a camera, or if her semi-threat to the irritable detective had just been bluster on her part. There was nothing in any of the usual places, but that just left her uneasily wondering if there was no camera, or if they'd just managed to hide it better than any other police department she'd been in. This left her wishing that the gunmen were still around, which was something that she felt more often than she ever expected to, and not always because they were useful or because her husband missed them.

"It's a two way mirror, huh?" the girl asked after a while. She nodded towards the wall.

"That's right," Scully agreed, not bothering to correct the idea that she was just trying to see through it.

"Are they coming back?" Kyrie sounded like she was going for indifference, but she failed. "I don't know what they expect us to talk about," she complained as an apparent afterthought.

Scully shrugged. "Do you know that they think the baby is yours?" she asked, wondering if that would get a rise out of the girl.

It didn't. She merely snorted. "Ha ha. I don't even have a boyfriend. I sure as hell don't have a baby."

"But you were picked up with him in your possession," Scully pointed out. "So of course they're going to wonder why you had him with you, especially when it became clear to them that he didn't live with the other kid."

"That was weird," Kyrie remarked.

"What was weird?"

Kyrie leaned back and affected a bored look. "They should have had stuff there for him. They knew that he was supposed to come to them soon. But they didn't have any baby stuff there. For a tiny baby, I mean."

"They were adopting him?"

"Yeah, I guess. I mean, he was supposed to be theirs, but I'm not sure how legal it all was, you know?" It was clear that this was meant to be a rhetorical question.

"Not really."

"Uh huh. They said you knew about them."

"Them who?"

If she thought this question would be answered, she was to be sorely mistaken. The girl had no real interest in giving her anything she didn't want to share. "Fox, that's my dad's first name, right?" Kyrie asked, and Scully nodded. "I didn't know that 'til recently. Anyway, do you and Fox have children together?"

For a moment she wondered if she was trying to determine if she would have to share a room if she ended up being released instead of imprisoned for her alleged crimes. That seemed rather optimistic. "We have son," Scully told her. "He doesn't live with us, though." For a moment she found herself thinking about the house Mulder has chosen for them, and its empty bedrooms. Even with him setting up an office in one and a guestroom in another, there were still empty bedrooms that had once sheltered the children of the farmer who had built the place.

"I know. And I know his name is William," Kyrie shocked her by saying. She looked nearly amused when Scully shot her a look.

"How do you know that?" Fear and concern made Scully's tone icy. _What if it was all a ruse?_ she found herself frantically thinking then, _what if this isn't Mulder's daughter after all, but someone the Consortium has hired to torment me?_

_Dammit, Dana, think,_ she admonished herself. The girl had Mulder's eyes. Even if they had somehow managed to clone his sister and let it grow up, Samantha had blue eyes. Besides, she thought the girl might have Diana's nose.

If anything, Kyrie looked grim and more than a little scared now. "I don't know if it'd be better or worse to tell you."

"You have to tell me," Scully replied, forcing herself to keep her voice even. Forcing herself not to lunge across the table and grab fistfuls of the girl's striped sweater to pull her close and force her to spill her guts. She wasn't exactly angry at the girl, but she wanted to shock her into honesty.

Maybe some of that showed in her eyes because Kyrie shrank back in her seat and looked down at the battered surface of the table instead of up at her face. "I would have gotten him next. If I could have. You have to understand, I did try to get that far, but the cops pick me up before we reached him." She traced a scratch in the wood with a finger and barely spoke above a whisper. "I got the little ones first because they were closer. Now I worry that I planned it wrong…"

From the oddly beseeching way the girl spoke, it seemed to Scully that she was trying to apologize for not having gotten to William too. And if she was, that made her more frightened than ever, because the only remorse she was showing was that she hadn't done **more** than she was accused of. There had to be a reason, and it couldn't be something pleasant. "Kyrie, why would you want to get William? And why did you take the other two kids?"

The look in Kyrie's eyes was bleak and entirely unfeigned. "I needed to get them before something bad happened to them."

"But why you, why did _you_ in particular have to make sure nothing bad happened to them?" Scully demanded to know. The thought of something "bad" happening to William was almost too terrifying to contemplate.

Kyrie's cup of soda jumped when she slammed her fist down on the table, and Scully involuntarily moved backwards. "I have to save them because they're my brothers!" Kyrie exclaimed, looking wretchedly unhappy. "I'm the only one who knew what they wanted to do to them!"

"They… They're your brothers?" Scully asked, confused. "William is your half-brother but-" If the little ones that she'd kidnapped were her brothers too, who was their mother she wanted to know. She knew Diana was dead, but that meant little; if they'd done to her what they'd done to Scully, Diana could have children who hadn't seen the light of day until years after she was cold in her grave. Somehow she didn't think that they had spared much more sentimentality for women like Diana that had been on their side than they had those they'd stolen away to experiment on.

"The little ones are too," Kyrie insisted. She was beginning to look tired. "And they may be _my_ half-brothers, but they're William's full brothers."

"No," Scully said, feeling herself fill with horror at the implication of that.

"Yes," Kyrie corrected her.

"You're trying to say that they're my sons? Mine and your father's?" Scully asked numbly. Could they have been so cruel that they'd done it all over again, like Emily? _Of course they could_, she told herself. She'd be a fool to believe otherwise. Hadn't she just imagined them creating children from Diana's ova? They had hers for certain, so many more than Mulder had been able to recover, so it would be naïve to think they had never used any more of them.

"Yeah," Kyrie agreed without pity or mercy. "Nathaniel and the baby are yours, too. They explained it to me once, but I didn't want to believe them. They tested us a lot, and the file room was fairly easy to get into if you knew what you're doing, so I looked one day at our DNA test summaries. They have the same mother even if I don't. But we all have the same dad."

"What's the baby's name?" Scully asked quietly. Maybe if she could focus on just one tiny part of what Kyrie said at a time, maybe she wouldn't completely break down and lose her mind.

"Nope," Kyrie said, shaking her head, and for a second Scully wondered if she was trying to be cruel. After a second she realized that she wasn't. "They didn't give him one yet. They like to let the parents name them. Right now, they call him XYDSFM007 in the paperwork."

"Seven." It felt like all of the world's horror could be neatly fitted into a single digit number that trailed her and Mulder's initials.

Kyrie shrugged. "There was a girl, right? They told me that you knew about her." The look on her face made it clear that she was really hoping that she wasn't giving her yet another shock. It made her wonder faintly how devastated she must look if a person accused of murder was worried about her.

"Emily," Scully replied, heart still feeling pinched. "She died."

"Before they had real names... Emily was one," Kyrie said with a tiny duck of her chin. "Even though you carried him they considered William to be four, though I don't know why. Nathaniel five, and the little guy is seven." She paused for a second. "I didn't get a number. Guess that's because there was only one of me. My mother probably would have set the place on fire if they made her any lab babies."

"What happened to two, three, and six?" Scully whispered, indifferent to the girl's thoughts on her own lack of a number or what Diana would have done if they'd made her any children. _It could be worse_, a voice reminded her, _Emily might have been left out of that string too, so there could have been a separate XX string as well_. Then there would have been another number one.

Kyrie hunched her shoulders. "I don't know. I couldn't find anything out about them. I don't even know if they were-" The girl swallowed hard and wouldn't meet her eyes. "-or are, boys or girls. Part of me hopes they're dead."

Another woman might have snapped at her and told her that was a hateful thing to say about siblings even if she didn't know them, but Scully understood the sentiment. In the grasp of the Consortium, a child might literally be better off dead.

Scully nearly screamed when the doorknob began to rattle. There was so much more she needed to ask Kyrie. Making a quick decision, she decided the best way to get more time to talk to the girl would be to help her. The kid had no idea how to help herself, so she'd have to guide her.

"When they question you, you need to tell them something," Scully told her.

Kyrie looked startled. "Everything?"

"No. Start with basic stuff, like where you've been living if they ask again. School. Where you work if you have a job." She could only hope that there was something about those things Kyrie could whitewash. "Keep it simple."

"Why?" Kyrie demanded, tone and eyes both conveying her suspicion. "Why should I tell them anything?"

"Because you want to give them a way to believe you. Offer them some information that can be verified, and maybe they'll trust that other things that you tell them aren't BS either."

"Oh." Kyrie hunched over again as the door finally opened, giving no indicator of whether or not she intended to take the advice she'd been offered.

* * *

><p>Lybecker was juggling two cups of coffee and what seemed to be another cup of soda, which probably explained why he had such trouble getting the door open. He set the cups down and passed them across the table without saying anything. To humor him Scully took a sip of her own and found it passable. "Thanks."<p>

He nodded rather than saying anything in response to that. Instead he looked down at Kyrie. "Since your dad can't be here, he signed documentation to the effect that your stepmother here can act as the parental representation that as a minor you're entitled to during questioning. Understand?"

"Yes."

Lybecker glanced over at Scully. "Do we need to wait for a lawyer to get here?"

Scully crossed her arms over her chest. "I haven't heard anything yet that indicates a lawyer is necessary."

"Uh huh." The detective looked like he thought she was kidding herself. "Alright, we'll begin then." He looked over at her again. "Interrupt as soon as a lawyer begins to sound like a good idea to you." The look he was giving her was measuring, as if he was trying to decide if she hadn't asked for a lawyer because she was hoping to screw the girl over. Considering his obvious disdain, she imagined that he might if he was put in that situation. Maybe he wasn't just BSing her earlier when he said things about how he'd react in her place.

Scully made a 'go on' gesture, waiting for him to begin. If it did sound like Kyrie needed a lawyer, she would of course ask for one. Mulder would want her to.

He flashed her an irritated look before turning to the teenager. "Let's start with what you were doing with Nathaniel Donavan and the baby that you claim has no name." Lybecker gave her an expectant look, as if he expected the truth to begin to pour out of her mouth now that she had a parental figure with her.

"Keeping them from being murdered," Kyrie insisted, and he rolled his eyes. "I'm being serious."

"Someone told you that they were going to murder an infant and a toddler?"

"Yes."

"And why would they do that?" Lybecker almost sounded bored. He took a long sip of his coffee and gave the teenager a look.

"They were stupid enough to think that I wouldn't try to stop them," Kyrie said. It was clear that she had interpreted his question as why would someone tell her, rather than why would someone try to murder babies. It made Scully wonder what he _had_ meant. "They thought that telling me was of no consequence." She shrugged, as if to say she'd handily proven them wrong.

"But you did. Stop them, I mean." Whatever the detective had meant, he apparently had decided that what she answered was interesting enough to pursue further. "I mean, the boys are alive and they're not."

"I did what I had to," the girl said tightly.

Scully listened to her, and studied her body language. Any doubt she had whatsoever that this was Diana's child fell away. Kyrie didn't have her mother's wealth of experience or the clout to bluster through things, but Scully had seen the same defensiveness on Diana when she'd done things that left a bad taste in her mouth. That had been one of the most maddening things about her – she hadn't simply been evil and able to do the things she'd done without the pangs of conscience. Diana had felt badly about at least some of the things she'd been asked to do…and had done them anyway.

Oblivious of what was going through Scully's mind, Lybecker continued to question the girl. "So you started your day deciding that you had to kill a couple of people?"

"I started my day the way I always do," Kyrie said, calmer now. "I went to my shift at the donut place and worked."

"Which donut place?" Lybecker asked, suddenly seeming interested.

Kyrie told him the name of a small donut place that Scully had passed by countless times before she'd moved to Virginia with Mulder. It had been a homey looking place, but she had never stepped foot in the place. As he listened to her, the detective wrote down the name and address, and then demanded that Kyrie provide the phone number before calling someone into the room and handing them the paper he'd written on.

"Okay, so you spent the morning and early afternoon slinging donuts, and then what happened? What made you decide to take Nathaniel and the baby from the Donavans' home?" Kyrie shook her head no. "No, what?" he asked irritably.

"I didn't take the baby from the Donavan house," Kylie insisted. "I brought him there with me."

The detective tried to hide his surprise that she had volunteered this by making an elaborate effort at disposing of his empty coffee cup before he looked back at Kyrie. Scully supposed he was trying to buy a few seconds to think. "So you got him… where? before you went to their house?"

"I got him from the people who were going to kill them both," Kyrie said quietly.

"And what, they didn't notice you'd taken him?" His lips thinned, and it didn't surprise Scully at all when he said, "Or am I going to be looking for another crime scene?"

The girl didn't seem to quite grasp the fact that she was all but being asked if she'd killed anyone else. "I was able to get him out without any trouble."

"Is that what you call it?" Lybecker's voice rose. "Do you call murdering a couple of people 'trouble'?"

"I-" she stuttered, throwing Scully a frightened look.

Before Scully could say anything someone tentatively asked "Detective?" from the doorway.

Lybecker reared back, and Scully waited for him to bite the interrupter's head off. He apparently knew who it was, because he got up with a growled "don't try to go anywhere" and disappeared without another word.

Kyrie turned to her, eyes wide. "Where did he go?"

"I'm not sure," Scully said, although that was a half-truth. She'd sat in on enough interrogations to understand that someone had called Lybecker away to discuss a finding. It wasn't necessarily something related to this particular case, though, so there was no real reason to mention it to her and possibly scare her when it could have nothing to do with her at all.

"Is he coming back?"

Scully looked over at the clock behind its wire cage and sighed. "I'm sure he will, eventually."

"Did I say the right stuff?" Kyrie asked anxiously.

"So far, yes." Scully reached over and touched the girl's wrist, not terribly surprised when she flinched. "But don't say anything now you wouldn't in front of him." She half wished she'd stopped her from saying some of the things she'd said earlier, but she mostly believe that the detective hadn't turned on a camera before after swearing he wouldn't. Mostly. And she'd learned things she couldn't regret-

"Why?"

Before responding she looked around the room, and Kyrie did too. "There's probably a camera in here."

"I thought things you said when there wasn't a cop around were, like," the girl reached for what had to be a vocabulary word, "inadmissible."

"They are. But that doesn't mean that they can't watch a tape and ask about things you said on it. I'm not sure how good a liar you are, but cops can have a way of asking things to confuse you, and you don't want to get caught up in lies. Better not give them any ammo if you can avoid it," Scully explained. She wanted to tell the girl that they'd have plenty of time to talk later, but she didn't know if that was true.

"Oh. I've seen movies like that."

It was all she could do not to laugh like a lunatic. The Alexandria PD was holding Kyrie on suspicion of murder and kidnapping, and she was comparing the dangerous possibilities of saying something unwise to a movie. Everyone said that teenagers' brains weren't fully developed and had a reduced capability to work out the consequences of their actions, but until just then she'd thought that was just a fact that really wasn't that people liked to bandy about like how we only use 10% of our brains and everyone desperately needs to drink eight glasses of water a day.

Forcing herself to maintain her composure, Scully just said, "It's not really like the movies."

Kyrie rested her chin on her fists. "I guess not," she muttered.


	5. Crazy Baby

Since neither Scully nor Kyrie spoke, the minutes ticked by loudly. Literally. For lack of anything better to do, Scully stared at the clock, wondering if there was a special supply catalogue for really loud clocks for interrogation rooms. The cage that surrounded it was obviously specially ordered, and it made her wonder if anyone had ever been left alone in the room long enough for them to snap and try to use some part of the clock to commit suicide.

For her part, Kyrie simply looked drowsy. Scully marveled at the idea of someone being able to get sleepy enough that they seemed in danger of nodding off after they'd been accused of a double homicide. _And don't forget kidnapping_, her brain helpfully reminded her. _You don't want to forget that you want more than anything to talk more to her about the little kids she alleges are your sons while you sit here instead not being able to ask her a goddamn thing about them. Or hear more about why she wanted so badly to get to William too, who you should probably have more loyalty to than a couple of infants you've never even met. But then, you were always good at not thinking about William when it was inconvenient to, weren't y_-

Detective Lybecker opened the door abruptly, saying only "Doctor Scully, a word?" before mostly closing it again.

Scully stood and gave Kyrie a weak smile that did nothing to erase the scared expression on the girl's face. Had she known the girl better, or at all, she might have gave her hand a comforting squeeze on the way by, but she didn't really know her and the fact that her hands were both balled into anxious fists pretty much broadcast the fact that a friendly touch would not be welcome.

"Yes?" Scully asked, trying not to match the terseness of the detective's tone. They weren't going to get anywhere if both of them were bristling.

Lybecker pushed on the door, obviously making sure that she'd shut it completely on her way out of the room. It was all she could do not to roll her eyes in reaction to this. "We're not going to charge her with either of the murders," he said abruptly.

_Thank God,_ she thought but didn't dare say. Out loud she asked, "why not?"

Frowning, the man said, "The coroner just got back to us about his initial findings. The dead couple? They've been dead for about three months. Kyrie's job confirmed that she didn't miss a single day all that month, or any time at all over the past five months, so we don't have probable cause. Maybe a labor violation for letting a kid work seven days a week, but-"

"They've been dead for months?" Scully asked to halt his rambling, wondering who had been looking after Nathaniel for the past several weeks if not the people who had adopted him. She had to shove down a possessive burst of indignation at the thought that he'd been neglected - after all, she only had Kyrie's word that the boy was related to her.

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt," Lybecker said reluctantly. "And they didn't die the way she said she killed them either. According to the coroner they were both shot point blank in the forehead. They definitely weren't stabbed in the back of the neck like the girl said they were-" He paused, and looked at her. "-before we read her her rights."

"In the back of the neck?" Scully asked, and she could barely raise her voice above a whisper. "Right here?" She indicated where she meant with her right hand.

"I see that she told you the same outlandish story," he snapped, unwittingly telling her that there had been no recording. It made her wish she'd simply let Kyrie talk then. Too late to change that, unfortunately. "I don't know if I should admire her consistency or recommend her for a psych hold."

"Did anyone find any, um, fluids? In the house, on the floors maybe," Scully asked, trying desperately to sound like it was a casual question.

Lybecker gave her a quizzical look. "Yeah. The responding officers said it looked like anti-freeze."

She waited for him to demand to know why she'd asked, but he just looked into the interrogation room. Scully didn't.

Bile churned in her stomach, but she forced herself to stay calm and tried to will away the horror. If the detective thought that Kyrie was lying, it was probably better than if he knew the truth.

Because the truth was, and Scully was sure of it, than the dead couple that Kyrie had killed hadn't left any bodies behind. Instead, they'd dissolved into puddles of green fluid the moment after she'd plunged the gimlet into the vulnerable spot at the back of their neck.

Which meant that for approximately the past three months the toddler that Kyrie had taken with her from the scene of the crime had been cared for by the sort of monsters that had once made themselves look like Mulder and had tried to choke the life out of her before she realized that the thing with her partner's face wasn't him at all.

And from the remorseful way Kyrie spoke about not getting to William like she intended to, Scully was terrified that William's adoptive parents had been replaced by the bounty hunter's cousins too.

To keep from panicking, she let herself get angry instead. "What about the kidnapping charges?" she demanded to know. "I'm assuming dead people can't press charges."

"Of course they can't," Lybecker blurted out, but then he looked like he wished that he could take the words back. "But the state-"

Scully crossed her arms. "I can, though. Or actually, I could sue."

"Sue who, and for what?" He looked very confused that the conversation was getting so far away from him.

"This department, for utter incompetence," Scully scornfully replied. "I want you to do a DNA test on those two little boys. See if they're related to Kyrie, and me."

"To you? But you're not her mother."

"No, I'm not. But after speaking to her about why she took them, I'm fairly sure you'll discover that I'm **their** mother."

"Look, I don't know what the girl told you, but-"

"She told me that they're mine, both of the boys. And that she was trying to bring them to her father after she rescued them when your people picked her up." Kyrie hadn't actually said that she was trying to bring the little ones to Mulder, but Scully couldn't imagine what else she would have done. Then again, why Kyrie hadn't planned to see Mulder before trying to get to William was something she wondered about.

"How is that possible?" Lybecker demanded to know with narrowed eyes. "A man might have a child he didn't know about, but you haven't said anything about having other children, so I can only assume that you didn't know about the boys any more than you did about Ms. Fowley-" It took her brain a moment to puzzle out that he meant Kyrie, not her mother."-I just don't see how that would be possible, a mother not knowing about some of her children."

Scully returned the glare. "I have an eight-year-old son. He was conceived through IVF and if those little boys are mine, then you've allowed the fertility clinic to get away with stealing embryos and selling them. Completely unchecked! And now you're holding my step-daughter for trying to rescue her baby brothers from their exploiters, can you imagine the field day the press would have with that?"

Her rather bombastic accusations had the desired effect, at least judging by the fear in his eyes. A tiny voice at the back of her mind told her that it shouldn't be that easy, but she told it to hush up because she deserved to have things go her way once in a while.

"Um..." Lybecker stammered. Up until that very second he had seemed like a rather competent law enforcement agent, but now he was giving her helpless looks.

"I believe that you were about to suggest that you're going to go and arrange for someone to come and take our DNA right now, weren't you?" Scully prompted.

"Obviously," he mumbled. Then he turned away and caught the eye of a young uniformed officer walking by. "Allison, go and find someone who can administer DNA tests, would you."

"Of course," the officer said before walking away.

Lybecker suddenly seemed to regain some of his composure. "Considering you're a doctor you must understand that even a rush DNA test is going to take a while to get actionable results."

"Yes, of course," Scully said evenly. "I expect you to do a competent job, not perform magic."

Her tone hadn't been overly polite, but it still had the effect of making him look a little less uneasy. "Well, good."

She thought for a moment. "Call Allison back, would you?"

Lybecker looked confused, but he went to the hallway and called the other woman. Then he gave Scully an expectant look.

Trying to be more polite, she mustered up a smile. "I'm sorry, Allison, could you also ask this person if they can do an ABO test too?"

Allison pulled a notepad out of her pocket, and wrote it down. "No problem."

"Thank you very much," Scully told her.

"ABO?" Lybecker asked as soon as the officer walked away.

"It's a blood typing test," she explained. "They do them a lot in the ER when somebody comes in and needs blood, because as you probably know a person can die if they give them the wrong type of blood. It's a quick test to get results for, so that makes it very valuable in an emergency situation."

Lybecker finished his coffee and asked, "Unh huh, and that test is useful now because…?"

"Being an FBI agent is not without risk of physical dangers. Even in the relatively short time I worked with Kyrie's mother, she got severely injured too," she said, deciding to gloss over the fact that Fowley had once been shot while trying to protect Gibson Praise.

"So I know that her blood type and mine are completely different. I'm type O, but Kyrie's biological parents are both type A. With two type A parents Kyrie's blood can only be A. If the baby or Nathaniel have type A blood too, nothing can be ruled since both Kyrie and my husband have that blood type. But if they have type O..."

"Then maybe they're yours," Lybecker finished hesitantly.

Scully shrugged. "Or if they're not ours, maybe their own father also has type O. It's nowhere near definitive proof of anything, but still, it might tell us at least a little bit while we wait for DNA test results."

"I guess," the detective said. The look he gave her had her wondering if he was questioning whether or not she wanted them to have type O. She wondered that too. Her heart of course screamed 'yes!' in response to the question, but her brain tried to insist that she couldn't let herself get too attached to the idea of either being their mother or being able to gain custody if they were her and Mulder's children.

So much so that she decided to change the topic to get her mind off of it. "Since I assume there will be something of a wait before the test can even be administered, is there any reason I can't continue to speak to her?"

"I don't see why there would be."

"All right then."

He stopped short, making her pause as well. "You like her," Lybecker remarked.

Scully gave him a confused smile. "What?"

"I was just thinking, you like Kyrie. Even though you hated her mother."

"I barely know the girl," Scully protested.

He nodded but said, "I've met a lot of people, and I've gotten a pretty good sense of them. A lot of women would have nothing to do with their husband's love child, but you're taking finding out about her well, even though she's in a boatload of trouble."

"Not anymore," Scully told him with a wan smile.

"No, I guess not," he said grudgingly. He gave her a warning look, though. "Even if we drop all of the charges, you'll have to wait to have her statement taken before you can leave with her."

_If?_ she wanted to ask. It made her wonder if he was bluffing, or if her attempt to threaten the department with legal action hadn't been as effective as she'd hoped.

Still, Lybecker didn't make a move to join her when she stepped back into the integration room.

"Has she eaten anything?" Scully asked, pausing at the doorway.

"Since we brought her in? No."

"Don't you think she should?" She frowned at him. "You've already had her here for hours, and it's not like you're going to let me drive her down the street for a happy meal."

He smirked a little at the words 'happy meal' but she'd used them deliberately to remind him that in the eyes of the law Mulder's daughter was still a child, and it was their duty to take reasonable care of her as long as they held her in custody. "Fine," he said at last. "I get someone to bring her a sandwich."

"Good," she said curtly. He walked away without asking Kyrie what she liked, but she supposed that was more than she could hope for. Besides, even if it wasn't something the girl liked, she'd survive an undesirable meal once or twice.

"What's going on?" Kyrie asked as soon as he was out of sight. She plucked nervously at the hem of her sweater, which gave away her nerves more than her tone did.

"They're not going to charge you with the murders," Scully announced. She watched the girl's face, expecting to see relief.

There wasn't much there. "And the kidnappings?" Kyrie asked nervously.

"I'm not sure yet," Scully admitted.

"What happens now?"

"Someone's going to bring you something to eat. And they're going to take our DNA-" She held up a hand when Kyrie flashed her a look of alarm. "-which is just a cheek swab."

"And after that?"

"I don't know." Scully looked at the clock again, knowing that only time would tell if Lybecker would take her seriously or not. She hoped he would for multiple reasons. Not the least of which was that he'd been right. She wasn't entirely sure why, but she **did **like Kyrie.


	6. We Gotta Get out of This Place

Over an hour later Lybecker came back in, looking like he was pretty ticked off. He had trouble meeting either of their eyes as he said, "as long as Dana agrees to allow you to be released into her custody, you're free to go."

Kyrie looked shocked. Scully felt fairly surprised herself, and that little nagging voice spoke up again about things not going like they should. Again she pushed it away. "I'll agree to that. But is this one of those 'don't leave town' situations?"

If anything, Lybecker looked more aggrieved after the question. "No," he said shortly. When she stared at him he sighed and went on. "There isn't enough circumstantial evidence to hold her on any of the charges."

There were a lot of things that ran through Scully's mind, but she opened her mouth and found herself saying "oh. That's good I guess." Then, before Lybecker could come to his senses, she turned to Kyrie and said "I think it's time we leave."

"I'll show you where to get her things," Lybecker mumbled.

Scully stop short. "And the boys?"

The detective's lips folded into a thin white line. He shook his head slightly, and then said "until the results of the DNA test come back they're going to stay where they are."

"With a foster family?" Kyrie asked, worried.

When he didn't answer her, Scully gave him an expectant look. "Obviously," he huffed.

"And when the DNA tests come back and prove that they're related to us?" Scully asked, knowing that she should have a lawyer there when asking such a thing. At that very moment being slightly reckless felt right. She couldn't really explain it.

Now he crossed his arms. It was a strange gesture on a large man. "If in fact they are your sons as you claim is likely, I presume that a family court judge would give you and your husband custody of them. Especially with the family the toddler has lived with being dead."

Scully was thinking hard about this, hoping that if the boys were in fact hers getting them would be soon, and that Mulder would be home too, when Kyrie spoke up again, "Before Christmas?"

Lybecker looked anything but charmed by this question. "I suppose it's possible."

Given it was the eighteenth, or technically already the nineteenth if the clock was to be believed, Scully found this almost too much to hope for. The fact that the charges against Kyrie were being dropped was a minor miracle in and of itself, and it didn't seem like she'd get many more. Still, she couldn't hope but long to see them. Lybecker seemed defeated, though, and maybe she could take advantage of that, even if she couldn't reasonably expect for him to let her visit with the kids. There was a chance that they weren't hers, so even though some things were going her way, she couldn't push them too far. However…

"Do you have pictures of them?" she demanded to know, feeling for once that she was in a position of power in her dealings with the detective instead of a victim of whatever the department decided. "You must've taken pictures of them when trying to determine what happened."

The detective sighed heavily. "Wait here," he said abruptly before leaving the room and slamming the door behind him.

Kyrie gave her a slightly worried look. "He's really not happy about letting me go it, is he?"

"No, I'm sure he isn't." When the girl looked aghast, she clarified. "It's not personal, you know. I know from experience what it's like to think you have the culprit to discover that you don't and you have to start all over again. It can feel a lot like pushing a stone up a hill for eternity."

"Like that Greek myth," Kyrie surprised her by saying. "Sisyphus." It made her wonder about the girl's education.

"That's the one."

Conversation dried up then. They said nothing until Lybecker returned, and thrust some glossy photos at Scully. "Here."

"Thank you." Scully's voice trembled, and she didn't look up at the aggravated detective. Instead, her eyes scoured the photo she held, searching for signs of her and Mulder within the tiny faces. She thought that Nathaniel looked like Mulder. His hair was a little bit longer than one would want for a two-year-old boy, and it was the same color as Mulder's. She had always wondered what color hair William's had decided to be, but she had never seen him this old, with hair this long. Nathaniel looked scared, but his eyes were wide open, and the same sort of blue Scully had spent a lifetime looking at in the mirror.

The baby, and as she thought that she realized dimly that if he was hers she would someday have the responsibility of giving him a name, was even easier to figure. Since he was a newborn, it wasn't surprising that his eyes were tightly shut in every picture, but he had a shock of red hair. He looked a lot like Charlie did back when she and Missy would bicker about who got to hold him just after her parents brought him home from the hospital.

When she looked up at Lybecker she noticed that his expression was chagrined. No doubt he had noticed some similarities himself, and must have begun to connect the dots before they had spoken very long. "If the test turn out the way I think they will," she said, tapping the photos lightly to make her point. "My husband or I could take custody of them?"

"Well, he's probably got to be tested as well, but if the tests prove that they're yours and you wanted him to bring them home for you I could get someone to help you sign a sworn affidavit to that effect, if necessary." It was clear that Lybecker wasn't entirely sure how that worked, but he seemed confident that it did, somehow.

"Good. Let's do that before I take Kyrie home," Scully said briskly.

"I think you're being a little cocky here-" he started to say, but a look from her cut off his objection. "Okay. If it means that I don't have to see you again, we can do it now and throw it away if it's not necessary."

Scully tried not to smirk at him, and thought she mostly succeeded. "We'll be back," she promised Kyrie.

The girl nodded, but didn't look entirely convinced that Scully wasn't just going to abandon her there. She supposed that shouldn't sting since the girl barely knew her and certainly not well enough to have a good sense of her character, but somehow it did a little.

* * *

><p>Less than an hour later Scully had signed several pieces of paperwork, and Kyrie had been given back an overstuffed backpack that was the same purple hue as her hat. Scully glanced at her, noting the anxious way the teenager held the bag by both straps. It hadn't seemed to take very long to Scully, but she wasn't the one who was desperately hoping that they wouldn't say it had all been a mistake and that she wasn't free to go after all.<p>

Glancing over at her, Scully tried to give her a reassuring smile. "Ready to go?"

Kyrie's voice shook. "Yes."

"Good," Scully told her, leading her to the door. She opened it, and wasn't surprised when Kyrie nervously hesitated on the threshold before stepping outside.

Scully took her keys out of her pocket. "I'll show you where my car is."

"Okay," Kyrie said in that same trembling tone.

Once they reached it, Scully used her key fob to unlock the doors, and again Kyrie hesitated with her hand hovering over the passenger door handle before Scully gave her a reassuring nod. Even with the door open Kyrie looked unsure about what to do with her backpack.

Scully looked at it. Somehow the sight of it made up her mind. "Do you have clothes in there? Stuff you could change into tomorrow?"

"Yup."

"Good. I think you should put in the back seat."

Kyrie did as instructed, and then tentatively sat in the passenger seat. Scully almost thought she was going to have to remind her to shut the door, but she seemed to think of it at the last moment and did it herself.

After Scully buckled her own seatbelt, she glanced at Kyrie and said "We're not going home."

The look that Mulder's daughter gave her was one part dismay, and one part fear. "We're not?" It was obvious that she was worried that she was going to be left on the side of the highway before long. She looked resigned, though, as if she was thinking that she should be thankful to have been sprung from jail at least.

"No, at least not to stay long," Scully said firmly. "We're going to Wyoming."

Kyrie look stunned. "You believe me?"

"I do. I don't know how much your mother ever told you about what your father and I, and occasionally she, investigated before she died. But I've seen a lot of things, and I don't think you're being alarmist. If you think that William is in danger, I believe you."

"What about the little ones?" Kyrie demanded to know, as they began to drive away.

"I'm going to get in touch with your father, and hopefully he'll get back here sooner than we do. It may be several days before they get the DNA test results anyway, and I am thinking that we would really be pushing our luck to expect to that they would give them to me without conclusive results in hand."

Kyrie leaned her head against the window. "You're saying there's nothing you can do for them now anyway."

Scully shrugged. "That's about the long and short of it."

"Triage," Kyrie said unexpected. She blushed a little when Scully turned her head to look at her. "Helping those you can the most immediately."

"More or less," Scully agreed. "But I don't think there's anything we need to rescue them from." Or so she desperately hoped. What were the odds of alien bounty hunters figuring out which foster home they children had been taken to? Probably next to nil.

There was silence for several seconds, and Scully thought about volunteering to let Kyrie pick the radio station when the girl finally spoke up again. "I hope we get to William on time."

"Me too." Scully glanced out the window, noting that there was a burger joint about a quarter of a mile ahead. She hadn't eaten since that morning. "First things first, we're going to stop at that hamburger place so that we can get something to eat – if you're not hungry yet, maybe you can pick something that doesn't need to keep warm. Then we'll swing by my house, and I'll pack some clothes myself. And we'll use my laptop to print out directions to William's house."

"I have the address," Kyrie volunteered. "I memorized it. I said I was going to go get him next, and they would have if-"

"I know," she said. And somehow she did know that. Even though she had only known Kyrie for a few hours she was absolutely certain that the girl would have tried to get to William next. "With the way the weather has been the last few days, and the amount of flights canceled, I think we're going to have to drive there."

It was already threatening to snow again, you could see it in the gloomy gray set of the clouds up above. "My car has good snow tires, so that should be a help." She looked at the girl again, pleased to see that she now seemed slightly less nervous. "I'm really hoping your dad can fly back today or tomorrow, but like I said, there have been a lot of flights canceled."

Kyrie considered this for moment. "Will he be upset that we aren't waiting for him?"

"Despite anything your mother might've told you, deep down at his core your father is a practical man. He may not like the fact that he's not going with us on this rescue mission, but he'll understand that someone needs to stay behind for the little ones." Scully felt brave as she said it, even though her heart cried out that it wasn't fair that she couldn't take those tiny kids with her right then and there.

But she was practical too. A road trip rescue mission was doable with a girl who was almost an adult, and even could drive for part of the way if necessary, but as badly as she wanted to see the babies, it would have been totally impractical to bring them along. She couldn't let her desire to hold them in her arms reduce the odds of them reaching William before something bad happened to him.

"She didn't," Kyrie said abruptly. When Scully gave her a questioning look, she sighed. "I never really understood how my mother could say that he was a good man, and not want him to know about me. But, that was pretty much how it was."

"That's good to hear," Scully told her, and it actually was. It had been her presumption that Fowley had probably not had anything flattering to say about Mulder considering that she didn't feel it was important to let them know that even had a child. Though, it did remind her uncomfortably of things she told William about his father. She didn't like to think that she and Diana had anything in common. Especially not something as intimate as what they told their children about their father.

"But…" Kyrie hesitated.

"But what?" Scully prompted.

Kyrie began to blush. "She… She, um, didn't like you very much."

The girl looked surprised when Scully snorted. "That was mutual. Your mother and I, we didn't have much use for each other."

"Oh." Kyrie suddenly looked relieved, as if she had been afraid that her mother's feelings would've been news to Scully. "There were a lot of people who didn't get along with her very well, at least as far as I remember."

"I think the same can be said of all of us," Scully said, trying very hard to be diplomatic. "Nobody rushes to hand out party invites to your average FBI agent."

"It's okay, you don't have to sugarcoat it like she wasn't unique. I know a lot of people thought she was a bitch."

"Did…" Scully started to ask before she could bite her tongue.

"Did I?" Kyrie asked. "No, not really. But I knew even as a little kid before she died that she wasn't like a lot of people's mothers. Mom wasn't the cookie baking type, if you get what I'm saying."

"I guess I can see that," Scully said, although she really was having difficulty imagining Fowley as a mother at all. Diana had diapered this girl's bottom and nursed her though early colds? She gave the girl a thoughtful look. Maybe there was a nanny. Maybe Kyrie got sick as infrequently as Mulder did.

As if reading her thoughts, the girl went on. "She wasn't all bad, though. I mean, she kept me safe as long as she could. You know, until she died."

Their conversation got put on hold temporarily as they pulled up to the drive through window, and somehow this came as a minor relief to Scully, who wasn't looking forward to asking the next thing she needed to know. The reprieve was brief, and before very long a man was handing Scully an over-stuffed bag of food in exchange for the bill she handed him.

To her slight surprise Kyrie had asked for a milkshake and she began to drink it as soon as Scully handed it over. The thought of drinking something that cold left her shivering, but Kyrie didn't seem to be bothered at all by holding the chilly cup.

Scully looked down at the lid of her own drink for a moment before regretfully putting it into the drink holder so she could pull away from the drive up window. "I think we need to talk about what happened to you after your mom died," she said quietly. "And if it's connected to why you took the little boys."

"Of course it is," Kyrie snapped. "How do you think I know about them, anyway?"

"So far I haven't known what to think."

The look Kyrie gave her was glowering. "I don't want to talk about that now, okay?"

"All right," Scully said reluctantly. "But we're going to have to talk about it eventually."

"I know." Kyrie sighed.

Scully shrugged internally and pulled off to the parking spaces. They didn't talk as they ate.


End file.
